It’s alarming to note the number of rock genres that have roots in a specific compilation album. The 1960’s folk revival sprang to life as a result of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music; punk rock got a jump start by Lenny Kaye and Jac Holzman’s Nuggets; indie pop became a new shorthand after the release of the NME’s C86.
Following in this legacy is Orchid Tapes co-founder Warren Hildebrand, who has been championing bedroom pop artists through his New York-based label since 2010. “Radiating Light” is Orchid Tapes’ second compilation—it gets its name from a lyric fromYohuna’s “Badges,” which was featured on the first comp. Each of its 13 songs is composed by a different artist, but each one also hews close to the label’s defined aesthetic: electronic-leaning, lo-fi pop.
But despite this general overlap, there’s a clear split between the glitchy, experimental electronica of Katie Dey, RickyEat Acid, the aqueous synth ballads proffered by Hildebrand’s Foxes in Fiction and the more straightforward pop of R.L. Kelly, Infinity Crush, and Owen Pallett.
The one constant is a general propensity for introspective, backward-looking lyrics. The album’s three standouts—Soccer Mommy’s “Memories,” R.L. Kelly’s “Mad,” and Yohuna’s “Geese Outside”—form a constellation of isolation; “Mad” ends with R.L. Kelly singing, “I can’t remember the person I used to be,” atop a solo guitar while “Geese Outside” begins with Yohuna singing, “I don’t remember a time / when I was happy, gracious, or kind.” The songs on Radiating Light not only define bedroom pop, but provide a compact introduction for future listeners.
Setting a benchmark for cool, even by New York standards, Overcoats bottled a feelings of connection, tension and the depths of love and trickiness of family relationships on their first album Young. Released on Arts & Crafts Records this year, the record has a tremendous subtlety with Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell drawing strength from vulnerability, lighting up the dark with their timeless, honest songwriting. The two best friends are guaranteed to captivate, bringing their noirish, hushed record beautifully to life.
Wave is an album by the Patti Smith Group, released May 17th, 1979 The title track was a tribute to Pope John Paul I, whose brief papacy coincided with the recording sessions. The first single off the album was “Frederick”, a love song for her husband-to-be Fred “Sonic” Smith with a melody and structure bearing resemblance to “Because the Night”, the group’s biggest hit. The second single, “Dancing Barefoot”, has been covered by many artists.
“Wave” is an album by the Patti Smith Group, released May 17th, 1979 on Arista Records. This album was less commercially successful than its predecessor, “Easter“, although it continued the band’s move towards more radio-friendly mainstream music. It was produced by famed artist/producer Todd Rundgren.
Artists Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met in New York City in 1967 and were in a love affair until 1974, when Mapplethorpe realised he was homosexual. Their early years together are documented in Mapplethorpe’s intimate black-and-white portraits of Smith, two of which featured on the covers of Horses (1975) an Wave(1979). In 2011, Smith interviewed for Time, “I was his first model, a fact that fills me with pride. The photographs he took of me contain a depth of mutual love and trust inseparable from the image. His work magnifies his love for his subject and his obsession with light.” The pair remained friends, artistic collaborators and soul mates until Mapplethorpe died of Aids in 1989. The photographer also shot album covers for artists including Paul Simon and is famed for his portraits and controversial images of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and 70s.
The title track was a tribute to Pope John Paul I, whose brief papacy coincided with the recording sessions. The first single off the album was “Frederick“, a love song for her husband-to-be Fred Sonic Smith with a melody and structure bearing resemblance to “Because The Night” , the group’s biggest hit. The second single, “DancingBarefoot”, has been covered by many artists.
The band broke up after this album was released, and Smith went on to marry Fred Smith. She spent many years in semi-retirement following the birth of their children, Jesse and Jackson, until her 1988 solo comeback album, “Dream Of Life” . The 1996 remaster of Wave includes Smith’s original version of “Fire of Unknown Origin.”Blue Öyster Cult‘s version was released on their album of the same name in 1981. The back cover of the original LP bore a quote from the Jean Genet poem, “Le Condamné à mort:”
Oh go through the walls; if you must, walk on the ledges
Of roofs, of oceans; cover yourself with light;
Use menace, use prayer…
My sleepers will flee toward another America
Upon its release in 1979, the album garnered mixed reviews, attracting either positive or negative commentary on its polished production and conventionality. Reviewers were not favourable in their reviews of the album, with the former negatively likening it to Radio Ethiopia, Smith’s last album to be critically maligned and the latter concluding her review with “is this the blandest record in the world?”.Melody Maker were more appreciative of the album, praising Rundgren’s hand in the production and considered the songs to represent a newfound focus for Smith and the band.
All songs were written by Patti Smith, except where noted.
New York indie rock darlings The Pains of Being Pure at Heart made an immediate impact on music culture on their 2008 self-titled debut, reviving twee pop and its various elements with bleeding heart lyrics, straight-to-the-gut candy riffs and Kip Berman’s paper-thin vocal delivery. There’s a Smiths-esque quality in there subtle melancholia, the perfect band to play over the loud speakers as a pink-laced Molly Ringwald walks into the record store with $15 to burn. These guys are the sweaty palms before you ask the girl in your French class to dance, the sketchbook under your bed with all the potential bands names for your fictional new wave band. They’re for the dreamers and the hopeless romantics.
And they’re BACK with album number four, their first endeavor since 2014’s Days of Abandon. The Pains have experimented with heavier sounds and different styles along their path over the last decade, so don’t expect this to sound exactly like their debut. It’s still gonna be f-ing great, though, and there’s only 500 copies on gold wax to go around, so get to the getting.
With The Drums’ new Abysmal Thoughts album, band founder Jonny Pierce is making the exact album he’s always held in his heart. Of course, this is The Drums, so that heart is broken—but there’s beauty and even bliss in this kind of heartbreak, as well as that special kind of glorious delirium that comes from taking everything life can throw at you and still walking away triumphant. If Abysmal Thoughts doesn’t sound at all abysmal—really, Pierce has rarely been this irresistibly pop—that’s because this is a story about how to figure out what happiness means once the worst has already happened. “Happiness can be confusing to me,” says Pierce. “It shows up out of nowhere, and before you can even get used to it, it’s vanished. But Abysmal Thoughts? I can rely on them—and with the political chaos that is raining down, who knows when these dark feelings will subside?”
As the last album cycle for the Drums finished and his long-term relationship with his former partner dissolved, Pierce took some time away from music altogether in hopes to reconnect with himself and find future inspiration. Determined to make a change, he ended up leaving his longtime home in New York and found himself isolated in a large empty apartment in Los Angeles, all his plans for life and love suddenly in shambles: “I said I wanted to let life happen?” he says. “Well, the universe listened and life began to fuck me real good! But honestly, I make the worst art when I’m comfortable. The stuff that resonates with me the longest—and that resonates with others—is always the stuff that comes out of my hardships and confusion.”
That hardship and confusion—and the clarity of personality and purpose it inspired—became Abysmal Thoughts, an unflinching autobiography with Pierce back in full control of the band. He’s back to not just writing all the songs by himself but playing every instrument, too, this time realizing exactly his own personal vision for the band. Not coincidentally, it’s some of the most revelatory work he’s ever done. The key was opener “Mirror,” and from there, Thoughts simply flowed: “It very much felt like I was releasing,” Pierce says. “I had this visual of turning a handle and watching steam just pour out of the valve, relieving a lot of my artistic and personal anxiety. I was dealing with so much loss and feeling unsure and scared—and if there’s one thing I can rely on it’s the healing power of being an artist. I’m falling back in love with music. Creating this album on my own was a full-on long-running therapy session.”
“Heart Basel” by The Drums from the album ‘Abysmal Thoughts,’ available June 16th on Antire Records
Across a year and three months of home recording—with the same guitar, synthesizer, drum machine and reverb unit he’s played since the beginning of The Drums—Pierce put together Thoughts, first in that apartment in Los Angeles and then later in his cabin in upstate New York. With help from engineer Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Mannequin Pussy and more) he gave Thoughts a pop sensibility that added color and contrast to an already vivid self-portrait alive with the hyperdramatic emotional potency of the Smiths, the arch literary pop moves of New Zealanders like the Verlaines and the Clean, and the riotous clatter-punk power of the UK DIY bands of 1979. And this time around he’s introduced an slight influence from early drum and bass as well, drawn from his adoration of Roni Size and other electronic artists from the UK in the 1990s.
Now the highs are higher than ever, and the lows absolutely bottomless, and it’s the last song—the title track—that makes everything clear. The Drums are back, and while there’s a heavy sadness here, Jonny Pierce is stronger for fighting through it. On possibly the loveliest and catchiest song he’s got, Pierce takes his listeners to the edge of the cliff, and then drops everything but his voice, singing “Abysmal, abysmal, abysmal …” Some albums might offer a happy ending—even some albums by The Drums—but here Pierce just offers an ending. Because that’s more honest, isn’t it?
“There’s something in me that mostly prefers a sad ending,” he says. “The other potential title I had was A Blip OfJoy, the opposite of Abysmal Thoughts—if those two things don’t sum up the emotional chaos that I feel every day, then nothing will! But Abysmal Thoughts wins because … doesn’t it always?”
Asthmatic Kitty Records is pleased to announce “Carrie & Lowell Live”, an audio and visual document of Sufjan’s November 9th, 2015 performance at North Charleston Performing Arts Center in South Carolina. It is available on YouTube and Vimeo and as an audio download (and streaming) on most digital platforms starting April 28th, 2017.
Released in March 2015, Carrie & Lowell is perhaps Sufjan’s bleakest album, tracing the songwriter’s struggle with grief and depression following the sudden death of his mother. To promote the album, Sufjan set out on an extensive worldwide tour, playing almost 100 concerts performing almost exclusively songs from the new record.
The show, which was designed by Marc Janowitz, incorporated an expansive lighting display and cathedral-like LED columns featuring home videos shot by Sufjan’s maternal grandfather, Nick Marabeas. Much of this vintage footage highlights family birthdays, graduations, and weddings of Carrie and her siblings from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, lending the performances the emotional arc of a memorial, celebrating Carrie’s life and meditating on her death with a sweeping transcendence that gave testament to Sufjan’s central thesis of mourning: that in spite of death, we must go on living in fullness and joy.
The live show featured many new interpretations, re-workings and expansions of the songs from Carrie & Lowell, itself a spare album. On stage, acoustic guitars, ukuleles, and piano were augmented by drums and percussion, electronics, and a motley of synthesizers to create an expansive sonic environment that moved from intimate to psychedelic without sacrificing the solemn nature of the material.
Carrie & Lowell Live captures Sufjan at his most vulnerable and persuasive, and it features a proficient, multiple-instrumentalist crew of musicians, including Dawn Landes (vocals, guitar, guitalin, piano, synthesizer, vocoder, percussion), Casey Foubert (vocals, guitar, lap steel, bass, piano, ukulele, synthesizer), Steve Moore (vocals, synthesizer, bass synth, trombone, Casiotone, piano) and James McAlister (drums, percussion, electronics, synthesizer, piano). The live show ends with an expansive 12-minute improvisational jam that looks (and feels) like nothing less than a born-again experience.
Carrie & LowellLive was shot and produced by We Are Films, edited by Keith Bradshaw and Deborah Johnson, mixed by Casey Foubert, and mastered by TW Walsh.
Half Waif is the 80’s influenced indie electronic project of Nandi Rose Plunkett. She refers to the material as a “search for a sense of place” and that search is reflected in her confessional lyrical content. Rose Plunkett uses echoing synth modifiers and pelagic keyboard tones to amplify the emotion revealed by her arresting delivery of these intrapersonal tunes. “Half Waif brims over with sounds: underwater echoes of Celtic melodies; mossy, blinking electronic soundscapes; the ultra- sad chord changes of 19th-century art music; and eternal, unending bhajans. A finely crafted glass menagerie of song…”
Band Members
Nandi Rose Plunkett – Vocals, Nord Electro 5D Keyboard and Korg Minilogue Synth
Adan Carlo – Bass and Vocals
Zack Levine – Drums, Roland SPD-SX and Vocals
Vagabon finds various ways to flood the senses. It’ll either come in a harrowing lyric that sticks in the conscience, or it’ll arrive from a soft drone that gradually envelops.
“Infinite Worlds” released February 24th via Father Daughter Records.
Laetitia Tamko writes poetic indie rock that centers around her life. Under the moniker of Vagabon, she crafts insular tales that defy traditional indie structures and incorporate elements from across the spectrum of r&b, spoken word, traditional rock and bedroom pop.
NYC’sCharly Bliss have released a video for “Black Hole” the latest from their anticipated debut album, Guppy. responsible for having crafted some of the finest guitar-crunched power pop this side of an old Weezer record with a blue cover. The ten tracks that make up “Guppy”, will be the band’s sparking full-length debut, showing them embracing all of their strengths — a combination of ripping guitars and irrepressible pop hooks, all delivered with the hyper-enthusiasm of a middle school cafeteria food fight. the song has “pitch perfect vocals ringing out over the beautiful chaos of shredding and banging.” The Matilda-style video stars sibling band members Eva and Sam’s one and a half year old cousins. Guppy is available from Barsuk Records due out on April 21st.
The band is currently on tour and have dates with Operators, Upset, Yucky Duster and See Through Dresses. Their energetic live show is not to be missed.
American laundromat Records have done a very special reissue of The Caulfield Sisters debut EP “Say It With Fire” on a one-time, limited edition run of 150 cassettes. The Super label took great care in preparing this one. Our good friend and designer Lonny Unitus reworked the original CD artwork and added some rare live photos by photographer Jasper Coolidge. Choosing a beautiful purple tint cassette shell, and spared no expense duplicating at National Audio Company on the very best Chrome Plus tapes with Dolby B NR. It also includes digital download card. The Caulfield Sisters are a critically praised independent band, noted at times for their sonic similarity to Throwing Muses and Galaxie 500. They have appeared at the annual CMJ music marathon, were featured in the New York art magazine Esopus,
The Caulfield Sisters have been called the Brooklyn Breeders and were named one of “NYC’s 10 Bands to Watch” by Time Out New York magazine. Featuring former members of the bands Pee Shy and Gloria Deluxe, The CaulfieldSisters debut EP “Say It With Fire” is a stunning release that has enjoyed critical acclaim worldwide.
“Sounds like angel babies from heaven after a night with Uncle Makers Mark” – VICE magazine
“Whimsical, beautiful and a little sad…atmospheric gems that will have you swaying back and forth, eyes closed and a sloppy grin on your face. Clearly these ladies have all the raw dreamy notions that most current music completely lacks.” – BUST magazine
“Perhaps the finest noise pop band in town” – Time Out New York
The Fat Angel Sings 